G.7 Troubleshooting Linux Driver Problems

G.7.1 Troubleshooting During the Boot Process

While booting ZENworks imaging, there are several things that you can do to help troubleshoot if there is a problem:

Press Esc to see the kernel messages. Usually, messages are shown for failures.

Screen 3 (press Alt+F3) is used to show the progress of the linuxrc process. It lists progress results, what linuxrc is doing, which modules are loaded, and so on.

Screen 4 (press Alt+F4) is used to show output from the modules during the linuxrc process.

Screens 1 (press Alt+F1), 3, and 4 can be used to help determine which part of the process is failing or causing a problem.

Screens 3 and 4 indicate which drivers are loaded.

If a drive is loaded properly but fails in some way, view screen 4 to see if there is an outdated driver.

If the boot process fails, the first command line parameter to use is acpi=off.

G.7.2 Troubleshooting at the Imaging Maintenance Mode Prompt

When the prompt is displayed, there are a few tools that you can use to gather information about the hardware:

hwinfo:
This utility is used by linuxrc to load hardware. You can use hwinfo -pci to determine exactly what hardware was recognized.

Pipe to “less,” because hwinfo can create a lot of output. For example, hwinfo -pci | less.

If you need to contact Novell Support for help, you should capture the output from hwinfo -pci to a file for their use. You can gather the most information with this command:

hwinfo –pci –log /logfilename

where logfilename is the name of the file that you should send.

You can then mount a device, such as a thumb drive or other USB device, and save the output file for later use. You might also be able to use FTP to save the file where it can be available.

ethtool:
This is a valuable tool (contained in a ZENworks distribution) that can be used to change the configuration on most Ethernet network devices. See the online help for information on using the ethtool utility.